The information age has resulted in an explosion of the amount of information that can be brought to bear in problem management. The connections among the ever increasing volume of relevant information have resulted in a near chronic state of information overload for all but the most trivial of situations. As decision managers are deluged by this overwhelming flood of information, they lose their ability to manage the details and connections of the relevant information. The end result is error laden uninformed sub-optimal decisions.
Designers of computer based data delivery systems have traditionally been reluctant to make decisions about selective presentation of data out of fear of leaving out relevant and important information. This fear is real, because the context in which the user is using the information is not known. The response to this concern has been for the system designers to present all possible information, usually in long lists with no connection from one item to the next. The designer is deliberately leaving the filtering and association building to the user.
People compensate for information overload in many ways. All are attempts to reduce an overwhelming volume of information to an amount that can be assimilated in the context of the problem to be solved. If the amount of information presented is overwhelming and unorganized, then volumes of data are filtered, and only isolated data points incorporated into one's thinking. Presenting large amounts of information not relevant to the decision at hand creates “noise” and the important information is drowned out. This only compounds confusion, contributes to poor decision making, and impedes the decision making process.
When relevant data is missing, users have an equally difficult problem. If the fact that information is missing is not identified, an uninformed decision results. If the relevant data is known to exist, but is not available, the user must decide whether to track down the information. The typical strategy is to “do the best I can” with the limited information presented. Additional data that are not presented, but could be brought to bear on the decision process, are ignored; the effort to locate the data is too great at the moment. Error laden poor decisions result.
When information is created, it must be presented to the user of the information. People have a limited capacity to form and remember associations. Therefore, information presented out of context is generally either ignored or forgotten. The designers of the computer systems that manage information are faced with the impossible design decision of either having the computer withhold information, or present it at the time it is created. Because the computer system does not know anything about the location of the user, nor what the user is attempting to do, there is no ability to incorporate the context of a situation into the decision about the delivery of the data. This delivery of data irrelevant to the decision at hand, ensures that the information will not be available later, when it is needed.
Health care in a hospital is a prototypic environment that has been overcome by information overload. The explosion of health care technology has resulted in a massive increase in the amount of information generated about a patient. In caring for a critically ill patient in an intensive care unit, hundreds of individual data points can be created daily. Information is spread among various locations and systems. No health care worker is able to track down all the data items, assimilate the information, make the translation to knowledge, and create a decision. The error rate in health care delivery has increased exponentially. Tens of thousands of deaths per year are felt due to errors in the implementation of testing and therapies in hospitals. The technicians, doctors, and nurses are unable to manage the details of diagnosis, treatment, medicine interactions, collection of test results, and communication. They compensate by trying to remember details, but the limitations of memory are overwhelmed. In general, the information that is selectively ignored exists in the hospital information systems, but is not easily accessible at the time the care is delivered, or is buried in a mountain of irrelevant information.
Therefore, it will be appreciated that for information to be useful, it must be presented in context. Only the data that applies to the current decision maker, the current patient, and the current care to be delivered is relevant. All other information must be suppressed. It is not sufficient for the information to exist, but to not be obtainable. It is not sufficient for the information to be scattered over many different computer systems or recording media (paper, X-Ray film, telephone). All the information must be brought to the hands and eyes of the caregiver at the exact moment it is needed, and only that information can be presented. Even having the computer screen out of the hands of the healthcare worker will defeat the ability of the contextually relevant information to guide the correct decisions.
Healthcare is not the only environment in which information overload, irrelevance, and inaccessibility inhibits effective data management and decision making. In a hotel, customers all have specific and idiosyncratic needs that are in a perpetual state of flux. The staff attempt to anticipate and respond to requests. Coordinating the people and resources in the hotel is expensive and inefficient. If the customer needs could be presented to the staff in a manner relevant to the context of the situation, this process could be improved.
Presentation of information, even when decision making is not involved, is difficult in the age of information overload. An example in which it is difficult to present situation-relevant information is a large zoo with open habitats. Information sources are fixed, such as a display at a habitat overlook, or uniform, such as from a guide book. That the animals being viewed are mobile, and the educational levels of the viewers are disparate, is ignored. As a result, the PhD Zoologist and the 8 year old on a school trip are presented the same information about an animal: even if that animal is not visible at the time. If the information displayed were to be targeted to the level of each viewer, and only information about animals in view was presented, the experience of each viewer would be enhanced.
Thus, there exists a unsatisfied need in the industry for the management and display of context relevant information. It would be advantageous if a user could receive context relevant information, where the context relevant information is based on the user's identity, the user's physical location, and the user's proximity to other people and objects. Furthermore, it would be advantageous if such information were delivered to users in a form such that information important to each user is immediately available without requiring users to navigate through multiple documents, pages or screens.